Released today: Practitioner Expertise from hope through Health and CHW-led Organizations to Optimize #UHC

Universal health coverage (UHC) is increasingly recognized as the best way to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal targets on health. But with 400 million people lacking access to essential health services and a projected shortage of 18 million health workers, it will take unprecedented effort and funding.

Hope Through Health believes that Community Health Workers (CHWs) are essential to achieving Universal Health Coverage. The ability to ensure quality health care that leaves no one out, in a country that most of the world has forgotten, relies on CHWs integrated with improved health clinics.

To harness the potential of CHWs to extend health services to poor and marginalized populations, there is an urgent need to better understand how CHW programs can be optimized. Their impact can only be realized when they are set up for success via integration into well-designed and adequately funded health systems.

To that aim, six organizations – Hope Through Health, Last Mile Health, Living Goods, Muso, Partners In Health, and Possible – have developed high-impact CHW programs with governments and communities across the globe. Understanding that several operational questions are unresolved by current academic evidence, they have come together to create a report identifying insights from their implementation experience.

Just launched today, the Practitioner Expertise to Optimize Community Health Systems report provides rigorous evidence that CHW care delivery can improve access to care and reduce mortality, and shares not simply how implementers have solved various delivery challenges-- but the ways in which their environments have shaped their responses.

Read the report to learn more, and join the next steps at www.chwimpact.com.